U.S. Pat. No. 5,128,951 issued Jul. 7, 1992 to Karpinski discloses a laser diode positioning structure which employs an electrically insulating plate into which a plurality of recesses are cut. The recesses are evenly spaced and each is cut to a depth to receive a laser diode bar such that the emitting facet is at the top face of a recess. Prior to the placement of laser diodes into the recesses, the recesses are plated with metal and the metal is then removed from the bottom of the recesses. Each diode, after placement, has an electrical contact to opposite faces thereof and those contacts are electrically isolated from one another. Such a process is time consuming and expensive.
An alternative technique is to stack metalized electrically insulated dividers with a spacer between each pair of adjacent dividers and to bond the dividers to a thin electrically insulating plate. The spacers are then removed. Such a technique is also expensive and time consuming.